This Weblog or "Blog" contains articles, events and opinions that support capital punishment in North Carolina and elsewhere. Author(s) of the contents are exercising their rights to free speech which unfortunately is often stifled or ignored by the media.
Contrary to what you might read or hear in the news, North Carolinians should be proud that an occassional and deserved execution is allowed to proceed.
- Wayne Uber

Wednesday, February 11, 2015

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Note: Read The Death of Punishment by Robert Blecker (Macmillan,
2014)
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The US doubled their prison population to 400,000 by 1983, from the 200,000
of 1948-1976, and then, with an additional increase from about 700,000 in 1990
to 1.8 million in 2008.

Our crime rates plummeted to 40-60 year lows (1).

The murder rate dropped by:

46% between 1976 (8.7 murder rate) and 2012 (4.7 murder rate)

54% between 1980 (10.2 murder rate) and 2012

Violent crimes rates dropped by:

17% between 1976 (468 crime rate) and 2012 (387 crime rate)

49% between 1991 (758 crime rate) and 2012

Property crimes rates dropped by:

41% between 1976 (4819 crime rate) and 2012 (2859 crime rate)

53% between 1991 (5898 crime rate) and 2012

Patrick A. Langan, senior statistician at the Justice Department's Bureau
of Justice Statistics, calculated that tripling the prison population from 1975
to 1989 may have reduced "violent crime by 10 to 15 percent below what it would
have been," thereby preventing a "conservatively estimated 390,000 murders,
rapes, robberies and aggravated assaults in 1989 alone." (2).

Studies by the Bureau of Justice Statistics found that 94 percent of state
prisoners in 1991 had committed a violent crime or been incarcerated or on
probation before. Of these prisoners, 45 percent had committed their latest
crimes while free on probation or parole. When "supervised" on the streets, they
inflicted at least 218,000 violent crimes, including 13,200 murders and 11,600
rapes (more than half of the rapes against children) (2).